Here's the current betaftpd.txt file that show up as a "man page"
I added a section that shows how it can be used.
If someone want to take it and make an HTML version, with a couple of screenshots (you could reuse the one on the top of this thread) I would be grateful, but I don't want to deal with it now.

I don't have a spellchecker isntalled on puppy yet, and I'm a poor typist, so I'd appreciate i if you guys can proof the text below so that I can correct it before I make what I hope is the final release.

Code:

**** BetaFTPD 0.0.pre17-pup-4 for puppy linux ****

Overview:
=========

BetaFTPD is a single-threaded FTP daemon.

The single-threadedness makes it faster than most other FTP daemons (contrary
to common belief), and makes it extremely light on memory. Although it lacks
a few functions (which you probably won't miss).
Version 0.0.18pre17 is more stable than the latest official release (0.0.7)

Homepage: http://betaftpd.sourceforge.net/
Original by Steinar H. Gunderson <sgunderson@bigfoot.com>
Port to puppy linux, download-only mode and Control Center by papaschtroumpf.

Use of *any* FTP Server can present a security risk if your computer is
open to the Internet. Use at your own risk.

Usage:
======

(if you are new to FTP, you may want to scroll down to the "Why an FTP Server?"
tutorial section below)

The original BetaFTPD has no command line options. To keep the program small, all
options were built-in at compile time. This modified version has one optional
command line argument to restrict anonymous ftp to download only, and one to
restrict FTP access to each users' home directory.

In its simplest form, just run the betaftpd executable to start the server. It
will run as a daemon and run in the background.

puppy linux includes a BetaFTPD Control Center available in the menu for most
Windows Managers (under Networking). You can also start the control center
manually by running the betaftpd-cc script.

You can access the shared directories with any FTP client or most modern
browsers (Windows Explorer, Firefox, ...), most of them through drag and drop.

The file transfer log is in /var/log/xferlog and is in the following format:
date xfer_time peer_address xfer_size filename b _ iN/oUT a owner ftp 0 *

Shared directories:
===================

All user can have access to their own home directory by logging in with their
puppy linux username and password. Note the following limitations however:
- for security reasons root cannot log in as an FTP user
- for security reasons users with a blank password cannot log in
- for security reasons the special user "ftp" does not have shell access

If you create a user for FTP access only, it is recommended that you don't
grant that user shell access for improved security. This can be done by
passing the -s /usr/bin/deny_sh option to add user as follows:

adduser -h /root/ftphomes/user -r /usr/bin/deny_sh user

In addition to user directories, the home directory of special user "ftp"
is shared to all anonymous users. That "ftp" user can be activated through
the Control Center.

Upload is allowed in all shared directories, allowing two way transfer of files.
However the Control Center has an option to disallow upload/delete for
anonymous users.
For added security, users only have FTP access to their own home directory.

Note that betaftpd support a "non-root" mode, and you may find references to it
if you look for it on the Internet. Support for it is somehwat experimental
and has been disabled in the puppy build. The Control Center requires that the
FTP server be ran by the root user.

Why an FTP server?
==================

FTP is one of the oldest and most common way for transferring files over the
Internet. An FTP client connects to a server and can request and sometimes
upload files to the server. There are many kinds of FTP clients. Some are
command line base, requiring you to know shell-like FTP commands, others have
a nice graphical interface, others are "transparent": you drag and drop files
between a browser and a lcoal folder wihtout knowing that you are actually
doing an FTP transfer. Internet Explorer in Windows and Konqueror on linux
have very good drag and dropp FTP implementations.
You need a user and password to log into an FTP server, however some servers
have a "special" user called "anonymous" that doesn't have a password. The
server will prompt you for a password but you can enter anything, although
net etiquette often dictate that you should enter your email address.

BetaFTPD can be used in a variety of ways:

1) User specific access:
For example you want to share files with a friend halfway accross the world,
but those files are too big to email: you can create an account for your friend
on your puppy machine as follows:
adduser -h /root/friend friend
you will be prompted for a password for user "friend" (you could call him Bob,
Mom or Fido), and when the process completes, you will have a /root/friend
directory. Put the files that you intend to share with him in that directory.
Start BetaFTPD (or more precisely the Control Center) from the start menu and
click "Start FTP server". If you don't want anonymous access (see below) make
sure that you click on the "Disable Anon" button.
Your friend can then type "ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" in his browser or his
favorite FTP client, where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the Internet address of your
computer and log in with the user name "friend" and the password you assigned
to it. (If you are beind a broadband router you will need to configure it to
allow port 21 and possibly forward it to the puppy machine. How to do this is
outside of the scope of this document).
Note that your friend can also upload files to /root/friend.
Unless you want your friend to have shell access also, it is recommended that
you create the account with the -r /usr/sbin.deny_sh (see "Shared Directories")

2) Access for everyone
Let's say that you're a budding music composer, or artist or programmer and
want to share the fruit of your labor with the rest of the world: you can't
create a user account for every person in the world! What you need to do is
allow anonymous access to your server: simply click "Enable Anon".
A new window appears prompting you for the password for the anonymous (or
"ftp") user. Once the user is created, the files in /root/ftp will be shared
to anyone that cares to look! The BetaFTPD offers to open a rox window to
let you see the contents of that folder, just in case you want to check.

Pay close attention to the status of the anonymous access shown in the Control
Center: if it says "FULL Anonymous FTP access is available for /root/ftp" it
means that not only anyone can log in and download your files, but anyone can
also log in and upload wahtever they feel like. This is dangerous! you could
end up unknowingly hosting pornographic or copyrighted material placed there
by one of the anonymous users for other anonymous users to retrieve.
What you want to do to prevent this (believe me, you do) is change anonymous
access to only allow downloading by pressing the "Download-only" button.

You may even want to press the "Enable Log" button to get a log of each transfer
in and out of your machine. Press the "View Xfer log" button to see the log. The
first line shows you what its format is (or see "Usage" above).

3) LAN file transfer
The examples above assume that you can and are willing to share part of your
computer over the Internet. There is one safer application that is quite useful:
Since just about every operating system has an FTP client, you can use FTP to
transfer files between multiple computers with different operating systems on
your home network. This is when allowing "full access" for anonymous users is
OK: some clients can be configured to automatically attempt anonymous access and
you won't be prompted for a user name pr password (the "transparent" clients like
Konqueror and Windows Explorer work that way). You can then drag and drop files
in and out ofthe "repository" in /root/ftp on your puppy machine.

If the other machines on your network are mostly windows machines, you may want
to look at using Samba, the windows "network neighbourhod" protocol, for example
using LinNeighbourhood which is also available for puppy.

Under the hood:
===============
For puppy linux, BetaFTPD was compiled with the following options:

--enable-upload so that you can upload files to the server

--enable-xferlog to provide a log of all transfers. If the log file doesn't
exist when the program is started, it will not log anything. That's what
is used in the Control Center to enable and disable logging.

--enable-fork the server runs silently in the background, "daemon-style"

--enable-shadow to support user passwords

In addition the code was modified to add the -restrict option to disallow
anonymous uploads/deletes. Another option, -contain, was added to restrict
user navigation to their home directories instead of full machine access as
in the orginal server.

papaschtroumpf,
Thanks very for the work you have put into this, it is greatly appreciated, not just by me but by all the other guys on this forum. Just wanted to let you know that.
Have a great holiday!

I'd be glad to write it up as html. Will put a couple screenshots with it and have it for you sometime tommorrow. Least I can do.

Nathan

Excellent idea. Just a suggestion: screenshots don't really need to fill the whole screen to make a good impression. Reduce their size with Mtpaint and they will still look sharp. You can also crop them to eliminate distraction or confusion, making your point clearer.

(If you don't already know how, here's a post with details on resizing images with Mtpaint.)

Latest version uploaded in the top post. Help file is a much improved html file.
Flash, I think this one is now ready for indexing.
Will upload the source in a bit._________________Mandriva LE 2005 user and puppy newbie

the top post is always getting updated with the latest code and comments.
I alwya do an "update new version" upload so that the download file number doesn't change._________________Mandriva LE 2005 user and puppy newbie

my apologies to anyone that downloaded since I posted the last version. I didn't test it on a "pristine" system and it appeared to work fine when in fact the help files were broken.
I have uploaded a new version (but still called pup-4, maybe it wasn't that smart) where the help files are fixed. You can now use man or the help button to get help.
sorry about that.

This has already revolutionized my work. I no longer have to burn a disk or mess with trying to get my extremely reluctant thumbdrive to work. Just set the files into the server and fetch them from wherever I want. I quote "I now declare Puppy to be perfect"

you can also use the built-in httpd web server to transfer files (or use Monkey) ... to transfer files from a Windows machine to Puppy (over lan or internet), you can run a web sever program on the windows machine ... i usually use HFS, but there are others that are good: http://www.rejetto.com/sw/

Monkey can serve symlinked files, but you need to enable symlinking in the conf file

anyway, a simple http or ftp server to transfer a few files is a lot easier to set up than setting up network file sharing